Eurozone citizens wanting to Buy Gold today saw the price rise above €33,150 per kilo - just shy of what was then an all-time record high amid the Greek deficit crisis of May/June last year.

China should increase its gold reserves appropriately, and must take every chance to buy, especially when Gold Prices fall, said Li Yining, a senior economist at Peking University and an advisor to the national parliament's Political Consultative Committee, quoted today by Beijing's official Xinhua News Agency.

Li's comments directly contradict Yi Gang - head of the politburo's foreign exchange management - who last month repeated his view that Beijing should not switch a substantial portion of its $2.85 trillion currency reserves into gold, since it would send the Gold Price sharply higher in the process.

The Chinese people will bear the cost at the end of the day as China is often the key buyer in these markets, he said in Feb.

But Li's view may carry more weight than most, says Reuters, because many of his former students are now high-ranking officials, including prime minister Wen Jiabao's widely touted successor for 2013, Li Keqiang.

Meantime in North Africa on Wednesday, Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi told Turkish television that a no-fly zone imposed by US or Euro forces would be useful in uniting his country - now descending into civil war - into fighting foreign powers instead.

In neighboring Egypt - where Gaddafi apparently sent a senior member of his government to deliver a message to military leaders today - hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square were attacked with knives and machetes, according to state TV reports.

The weak US Dollar and intensifying violence in Libya drove gold to a new set of nominal record prices, says the latest Gold Investment analysis from Japanese conglomerate Mitsui's London team.

The metal remains in a well-defined bull channel with parameters at 1420 and 1451, says technical analysis from Russell Browne, strategist at bullion bank Scotia Mocatta in New York.

The potential risk is crude oil may continue to go higher, and if floods and drought happen again, we'll face further price increases, said the United Nations' Hiroyuki Konuma in an interview.

Senior HSBC economist Karen Ward told Sky News in London that even in the developed world I think we could see social unrest.

We have very, very low wage growth, so people aren't getting more in their pay packet to compensate them for food and energy.

Speculators on Wall Street are using the [Middle East] unrest as an excuse to push prices up in the futures markets, reckons Tyson Slocum, director of energy program at the US non-profit Public Citizen, and now serving on commodity-watchdog the CFTC's new Energy & Environmental Markets Advisory Committee.

For US crude oil in particular, There's no supply-demand fundamentals that are justifying this huge price spike, he believes.